Editors' Review

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by: Download.com Staff
on August 07, 2012

With so many free firewalls to choose from, products need to stand out in some way. TinyWall emphasizes simplicity, flexibility, and unobtrusiveness. This free firewall is designed to harden and add more control to the existing firewall in Windows 7 and Vista. Instead of constantly hitting you with pop-ups asking you to allow or deny access to a program or Internet address, TinyWall lets you quickly add allowed sites to your white list in several ways. For example, you can use a hot key and click any open window to add that app to your white list, or you can select applications from a list of running processes. Like the Windows Firewall it's based on, TinyWall works with other firewalls in place, too.

As with most firewalls, TinyWall's system tray icon accesses the program's main menu, features, and options. TinyWall starts in Normal Mode and allowing Private Zone access. From the menu, we could change the mode to block everything, allow outgoing traffic, and enable an autolearning feature. TinyWall offers three hot-key shortcuts for whitelisting programs: by executable, by process, and by window. We could also click Elevate, Show Connections, Enable Blocklists, Unblock LAN Traffic, and initiate other operations from TinyWall's system tray menu. Clicking Manage opened a tabbed dialog that let us add, remove, and edit exceptions, including special exceptions, change the password or interface language, import and export settings, and many other maintenance operations. TinyWall updates automatically, too, and notifies you when settings have been changed or updated. TinyWall's hot-key-based method works well, and we certainly didn't miss having to click two (or three) pop-ups in a row. Whining about PC security is courting trouble, but TinyWall lets you manage your firewall settings and permissions quickly and easily without the nagging.

Microsoft packed a pretty good firewall into Vista and Win7, but it's got some shortcomings, such as a clunky interface, not to mention the fact that it's too easily disabled by many apps. TinyWall by and large addresses these shortcomings. We like it. It takes some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, TinyWall's advantages become clear.

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Publisher's Description

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From Karoly Pados:
TinyWall includes a combination of features that sets it apart from both commercial and freeware firewalls. TinyWall does not display popups that "urge users to allow". In fact, it will not notify you of any blocked action. Rather than displaying popups, TinyWall allows users to white-list or unblock programs via various methods. For example, you can just initiate white listing by a hotkey, and then click on a window that you want to allow. Or, you can select an application from the list of running processes.

What's new in this version:

Version 2.0 has added new learning mode and support for running in a virtualized environment.

Is a nice easy to use firewall for a single user machine but it simple does not work with multiple users and completely blocks every other user other than the one that installed it and gives an error when you try to change setting which is a pretty serious flaw and a deal breaker. I had to uninstall it as this makes it useless.

the w7 firewall is quite unintuitive to configure for anyone not in depth familiar with it and/or coming from a separate firewall with a user-friendlier interface. tiny wall takes care of that quite well and while there is certainly room for improvement it does make handling w7's on-board firewall significantly easier

Cons

some quirks I've encountered took me to the brink of uninstalling the app for good. I've finally decided to give it one last try, though. problems being: re-setting your settings for no obvious reason, forcing you to reconfigure everything allowed. blocking all internet traffic arbitrarily, as it seems, (forcing you to reset your settings yourself - at least that helped). finally, after installing avg free 2013 not only the internet could not be accessed anymore but the tiny wall service kept starting and stopping itself over and over (leading to massive cpu consumption) while presenting itself as "unavailable", thus preventing you from restarting and/or configuring it manually. uninstalling it was the only solution. as said above, now running the third and last test.

Summary

nice if you can live with bugs and your requirements are not too high. however, if problems arise, they usually will prevent you from accessing the net and thus the many solutions you could find there. with a bit of work and more thorough bug-testing it would be recommendable outright

Updated on Jan 22, 2013

[1/2] Just installed the lastest version and usability-wise imho it has deteriorated. The handy auto-learn feature has been removed (yes, I know that it can lead to problems, esp. if you forget switching back to normal) and thus much more has to be configured manually. For configuration you have to use so-called profiles or individual port configuraton. Either way, you should know at least a bit about how the program you want to unblock works: if not the specific ports then at least if it works as a http(s) client or server, with pptp or l2tp etc. Or you use the profile "blind trust" which, according to its name (other information is not given), should unblock all. It didn't with "Bid-O-Matic", though.

Updated on Jan 22, 2013

[2/2] The program detection service does not recognize many of my programs (e.g. Waterfox or Cisco VPN Client; from Thunderbird it only detects the plugin-container etc.; otoh, Opera is detected twice).

As soon as you hit "apply", the gui closes. You cannot edit several apps in a row but always have to open the ui again. Irritating.

Finally, the program now can no longer be uninstalled from the control panel but only from its own tray-icon/gui. It seems to me that this would effectively have prevented my uninstallation last time (still the old version) when the TinyWall service had blocked net access completely, constantly started and stopped again and the icon itself had been greyed out - "not available".

After these experiences, I'd judge it as both too risky and too complicated (or rather lacking in ease-of-use) to use this over the original W7 firewall controls.

When you mention what has deteriorated in the new version, you have got mistaken. All those changes you didn't like, like the profiles, the "blind trust" option, or the absence of auto-learn were to be found in version 1.0 of TinyWall. My point is, you thought you have upgraded, but in reality you have downgraded. Some download sites host outdated versions of TinyWall, if you want to be sure you to get the most recent version, TinyWall's website is your best option. Alternatively, you can check for updates from within the program. Btw, version 2.1 is supposed to fix the "volatile settings bug". - the Author

I installed and used this for about a month.A lot of the times,when I either re-started or came out of sleep mode,the program would not allow me to change it's status,as the status was unknown.It also caused some issues when I uninstalled it(luckily I had a good system image to restore from).

Cons

I installed and used this for about a month.A lot of the times,when I either re-started or came out of sleep mode,the program would not allow me to change it's status,as the status was unknown.It also caused some issues when I uninstalled it(luckily I had a good system image to restore from).

i was a massive fan of zone alarm but as the years roll by, it just got more and more buggy. clunky, just annoying, eventually i had enough and decided to switch. I am so glad i did, tinywall works exactly like a firewall should work, silently, in the background, its my silent guardian.

okay so, when you first start using it, you may need to add specific programs manually to the cleared list but when your done with the config thats it job done :)

i'm happy with it so far been using it for about two weeks, i would recommend this for sure.

Initially it seemed easy to use. It blocked some programs but I was able to unblock them easily.

Cons

Never could get it to stop blocking carbonite. As soon as I uninstalled TinyWall, Carbonite started working.

Summary

TinyWall did seem easy to use and effective. However, my inability to make it stop blocking Carbonite made TinyWall unacceptable to me. Given that Carbonite is a pretty mainstream service, it really should be on the list of programs allowed access by default.

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